Steamers Arrived! Rethinking Indigenous Transport and Mobility on the Brahmaputra

• In Event: The River and Mobility in South and Southeast Asia, 1850-1950

Abstract

In the course of the nineteenth century, Assam, India’s northeast, became part of a complex global economy, driven by a plantation economy, extraction of mineral resources and timber trade. British officials and military personnel, traders, indentured labourers and peasants arrived in this ‘geographically isolated valley’ to produce tons of primary goods for the global market. All these momentum placed an extraordinary focus on the Brahmaputra as a powerful actor to move goods, ideas and people. The arrival of the steamships in the mid-nineteenth century added an extraordinary feature to this spell of motion. This paper will examine how the steamer negotiated with local ‘slower’ modes of transports to reshape the way people and products of Assam found a passage to global space. In particular it will show that although the steamer symbolized safety and speed on the rough water of the Brahmaputra, at least in the imperial officialdom, it was never able to totally displace the traditional canoes of the Brahmaputra. The paper, therefore, argues that the process of capitalist development and associated technological globalization as manifested in the steamer was not monolithic and sweeping, allowing for indigenous forms of technology such as canopy. The persistence of the local water transport against modern technology in the age of empire not only denotes the former’s place in the mobility that globalization process demanded, but it also asserts the ecological agency the river Brahmaputra itself.

Author

• Arupjyoto Saikia, Indian Institute of Technology Guwahati